becoming god: a meta post
i would love to see all three of these guys in a room together i would love to know the outcome
alex garland worked as a 'story supervisor' on the reboot, a role that no ones ever particularly elaborated the full extent of (this is coming off of enslaved, a game he was co writer of so like...really up in the air how involved he was)
but upon like watching some of garlands works, i feel like vergil was one of the things he had some strong input on that the team like took into the final version of the story because he just really resonates with some of garlands other weird tech millionaire guys. largely forest (devs) and nathan (ex machina), featured above
like the three of them all share some tie i cannot fully articulate but it is there. perhaps its the tech millionaire thing. perhaps it is that coupled with the god complex. but i am going to do some literature analysis and try and see if we can find a thesis on the way
and i do not think the three would quite get along i think it would go badly lmao
spoilers for: devs, dmc devil may cry, ex machina, and enslaved odyssey to the west under the cut. as well as musings on wealth, technology, and godhood.
like forest as a character is driven by the immense grief and guilt of his families death. so much so that he's just throwing money at the issue to resolve the problem. he does not care about anything except that, except getting some sort of absolution for that. the absolution he wants, that is (that he is not to blame, truly, for their deaths because if the universe is deterministic rather then fitting in with the many worlds hypothesis then his wife and daughter were predestined to die before a single human person took breath). he literally builds himself a god to prove this fact, only to then break the way the universe operates by absolving himself of this blame.
meanwhile vergil literally can be god. because he's literally not human he's literally just some demon/angel hybrid who can kill gods and essentially become one. which is neat for him. it's interesting how out of the three of them, due to the thing he's in, he's not really like...the tech thing is not on the forefront of his like story. but it is in the forefront of how he behaves and i feel kind of the core of what separates him from preboot vergil, right? preboot vergil is this artsy loner. reboot vergil is a tech guy, he's a strategist, he will manipulate to get to his point. he throws money at his problems until they are solved (example: the order itself, because to him mundus is a problem to be solved and vergil thinks he can do that). i feel like his wealth and privilege and intelligence really ties in here.
which brings me to nathan who invents sentient life and plays god with it because...well...who's going to tell him not to? he lives in the middle of no where and has created artificial, sentient life. he has created the system in which he gets to play god. he has created grounds to be a god. but what's interesting about him is this contradiction because he is very clearly playing god. at the very least he's playing Pygmalion. the intent is artificial intelligence he deems correct, he deems perfect. but his stated reasons, his stated goals, do not seem to come from this place. to him, this is just inevitable. if he does not do it, someone else will. he, in his own words, is creating the means for humanities destruction but he cannot stop the arc of time. the technology can exist, so it must exist, so he will make it exist.
is this not unlike god, in a way? for if there is such a thing as gods then they all created us with full knowledge of what we are now and how as a society we increasingly are turning away from them. thousands of gods have fallen since mankind walked its way into existence, most of them with names we'll never know. all creating us and our world in their image in one way or another, knowing full well one day people will stop believing in them and replace them with something else.
there's an interesting parallel between nathan and forest here. see, forest creates a god (quantum computer) to give him deterministic reality and one of the first things he does with that is go all the way back in time to see the first humans, the first homo sapiens. this implies, then, he is also witnessing the beginning of the end of the neanderthals' as we know the species coexisted. in the death of one species another grows and rises, because that's the nature of things.
this is very similar to how nathan sees the artificial intelligence he's creating. that it will replace man, not just in labor but in its entire. he is inventing, to him, the extinction of mankind. he is that moment forest is watching in devs, that moment where the next species out takes over the prior.
this is all interesting when we consider vergil.
he's very driven like these two are by what he seems to see as an absolute, as a thing that has to happen. mankind must be freed from mundus. it's what must happen. he though, unlike forest and nathan, refers to it as destiny. something mystical. something beyond scientific reason. he believes in this future he is creating and he believes it is his job to bring it foreword. and, unlike them, he is not human. he is not human and he believes he is so.
nathan and forest are two human men, trapped in their humanity. forest a victim to his own grief, made into a shell to propel it foreword to its inevitable conclusion as created and predicted by him. nathan, victim to what he sees as the inevitable progress of the species. that it will end, and that he is just simply a conduit to the inevitable that will be. he sees it as a choiceless choice, something that either he does now or someone else will do later in his life time. In being human men, they are subject to the arc of science. they are not bending it, they are simply pulling it from where it already exists. bringing clarity from beyond the veil.
vergil, not human, not man, instead shapes his fate. it is not inevitable that he defeat mundus, it is something he must create, something he must grasp, something he must do. if he does not, no one will. his destiny. something that will not come to pass without him.
it's interesting, this contrast. this idea of humans being pulled by this inevitable string of time, much like the reality devs (the show) uncovers through forests technology. and this idea of the non human, exempt from this, able to mold it and change it because he is outside the system. not beholden to the trappings of man.
to be god is, inevitably, to be above. and no matter what forest and nathan do, they can't really do that. because they are, regardless of what they do, a part of man. they are human. they are part of the same science that they are doing, stuck in the same rules that they cannot bend or break just illuminate and uncover. they will always be human. even of nathans right and his ai will replace mankind. even with forests discovery of how reality itself works, remaining unable to change that reality.
vergil, though, fails godhood to, doesn't he?
he takes out mundus (or, well, dante does and vergil just takes part of the credit). but when he suggests taking the throne, taking that spot mundus left, he fails. ever so different with his lofty ideas of destiny, of duty, of the paranormal and the spectacular and yet he is no different then these two human men, fumbling around in their false ascension.
i don't really know what the point is, here.
but i do think these three characters have an interesting conversation between the three of them. all offering an interesting insight that creates an equally interesting picture about unlimited power given to people already so far detached from the average experience of everyone else.
like i could keep going with this new idea i just presented. even counter some of my earlier suggestions. with this idea of money equaling a modern sort of godhood. i make this point in some earlier vergil metas, even. that being raised in a rich family, having money of his own twice over, that he's a divine thing raised as close to divinity as a human can. that what enables forest and nathan to then attempt to reach their own godhood is the fact they are so wealthy that money does not stand between them and their goals. like there is nothing stopping either of them because who is going to say no. they have unlimited resources, unlimited access, unlimited ability to do whatever they want. vergil is no different, his perceived destiny made possible by his available wealth.
there's a saying, right, more money then god. god doesn't need money, of course. there's no need for it when everything you could want, everything you could ever do, is right at your finger tips. but that's what the saying is, well, saying isn't it? that enough money means you, to, have everything at your finger tips. even more so then a god might. more ability, more access, more power. i mean, enough money, you can essentially kill god like forest and nathan have.
all three of these men represent that. money becoming it's own kind of divinity.
one of my favorite meta posts on enslaved: odyssey to the west (the only game penned by alex garland) that i have, unfortunately, loooooong since lost track of, muses on this idea. that the leviathan, the final boss of the game, is perhaps a god created by the other mechs in the game. that they, the robots without artificial intelligence really who roam the lands after some event centuries before the start of the game, have maybe begun to assemble and create a primitive society and are displaying one of the biggest indicators of that, crafting their own organized religion.
i think about this all the time, the idea that any society will eventually craft it's own gods. that intelligence is in this constant cycle with science and mysticism to explain itself, to explain where it comes from, to perpetuate itself with answers for questions they don't even know yet.
it's the same cycle these three are kinda stuck in. creating their own gods within themselves to answer questions they don't even quite know yet, scrambling to justify their need to push further then perhaps nature wants them to. calling it inevitability, calling it destiny. sort of snakes eating their own tails.
because this quest kills all of them, right? i guess except vergil.
but forests need to explain his wife and daughters death leads to him creating a machine that can see all of time until the specific moment where someone acts outside of their code. approximately like...a day after he finishes his glorious computer. he dies on the ground of his lab with the woman who breaks the universe and wakes up in the very same machine he made, now stuck there in infinite universes because the universe is no longer deterministic. it's multi world. he broke it.
and nathan, in his desire to create the thing that destroys him...well...succeeds. his ai is sentient and his ai kills him before escaping his complex in the middle of no where by herself. he was right, he did create the means for his own extinction.
vergil doesn't die. not really.
but his desire to assume his 'destiny' as he understands it doesn't succeed. dante nearly kills him and vergil flees, sealing himself off further from what made him human because, to him, this humanity has betrayed him. it's keeping him from full ascension.
this isn't even touching on enslaved and pyramid, perhaps another example of alex garland tech millionaires who fancy themselves to be gods beholden to their own limitations. perhaps he's the even truer natural end point of these characters.
because that one has 'saved' society by using his own memories of his life prior to the end of the world to enslave, well, a shit ton of people and force them to live his life over and over and over again because he cannot cope with the fact the world outside of pyramid, outside of his new home, is different. he furiously digs his claws into the sand and refuses to budge, to move on, to accept that the world he knew is gone.
so he lives in his memories, dragging hundreds, maybe even thousands, with him into this dream as his body ages and rots, hooked up to inky black tubes in his otherwise pristine, white room.
a lot of people don't like the ending of enslaved.
i have been obsessed with it ever since i saw it.
monkey and trip are faced with this sight, this man impossibly old in front of them who has decided he knows better then everyone else how to live in the apocalypse. trip, a creature raised on free will and thinking nothing is more important then it as she copes with the fact she's taken monkeys, is horrified.
monkey, wearing a slaver headband and who has been grappling with the loss of his free will in trips hypocrisy before deciding he prefers the comfort in connection to her...he is briefly pulled into the dream. pulled into a reality that he'd never even thought possible.
his life has been hard, spent scrapping metal and trading it between the few remaining human settlements. his name died with his parents long, long ago. his friends are few, or at least were before this journey and he met trip. pyramid shows him something else. something easy, something soft, something gentle.
he smiles.
trip rips out the tubes from the old man, killing him and ripping everyone from the dream including monkey.
when she sees his face, she asks if she did the right thing.
i don't really know, personally. i don't think monkey does either. i don't really know if the game, at large, knows.
trip might have killed god, though. so there's that.
